Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller Read Free Book Online

reflected sight of herself in the glass of the French doors—her dark hair frazzling gray, her face white and pouchy.
    She opens the refrigerator and stands in its exhalation of cool, slightly rotted-smelling air. After a moment, she reaches for a half-full bottle of wine. This is not what she wants—she doesn’t know what she wants—but she pours herself a glass. She’s full of anger—at herself, at the girls, at Mark. Standing at the kitchen counter, she drinks.
    The wine is too cold, too sharp.
    It was a nice day until just now, she thinks. She’s trying to calm herself. She makes herself remember Theo, swimming, his little body working so hard to get across Gracie’s pool. She thinks of the game they played at dinner, the fairy tale and the white horse.
    Happily ever after , she thinks.
    And for the first time on this ordinary day, it comes to her: her sorrow, her sweet, sad familiar. Almost gratefully she bends under it, tears thicken in her throat. Leaning her upper body over the counter for support, she begins at last to weep.

Chapter Three
    M ARK HAD AN AFFAIR ; that was the simple way to explain what went wrong in his marriage to Eva. The girls were small then, six and three, his dark-haired daughters. Daisy still had the stubby fat fingers of babyhood. He adored these fingers. In fact, sometimes Mark felt nearly dizzy with the intensity of his love for both of his daughters, with his consuming adoration of their physical beings, his fascination with every phrase that fell from their lips. With their lips themselves, delicate, perfect, framing the words.
    But he’d forgotten his love for Eva. Or rather, he’d misplaced it. He knew it was still there somewhere, but for the moment, he didn’t know how to get to those feelings.
    The problem, it seemed to him, was that she’d sunk so heavily into motherhood, into managing all their lives. He’d barely be in the door at night before she would start rattling off her list—what needed to be done to get supper on the table, what had broken in the house that he’d have to fix, soon! what one or the other of the girls had taken to doing that he’d have to help her deal with. Oh! and had he picked up milk? (or Pampers, or dog food) on the wayhome? And why was he so late? and since he was so late, how come he couldn’t have called?
    It seemed to him that what she wanted—without ever articulating it and maybe without even understanding it—was for him to have had to live through her day, to be as stuck, as mired, as she was. This is what made her angry and cold. He felt too that there was a kind of squalor to their life at home that couldn’t help but feed both their misery. Dishes always sat undone in the sink. The children’s projects—spilled paints, scissors and scraps of colored paper, dried-up playdough, toys—were always spread on the dining room table, on the floor. Books, dolls, blankies, dress-ups were everywhere. You couldn’t sit down without first having to pick up whatever child’s toy you might have sat on. Sometimes, coming into the house, he felt he couldn’t stand it. Once, within a few minutes of arriving home, he had filled the sink with soapy water and started to wash all the leftover dishes, to wipe the smeared and crumb-scattered counters. When Eva came into the kitchen and saw what he was doing, she charged him.
    “Oh, stop it!” she cried out. “Just fucking stop it, stop it, stop it!”
    He thought at first she just wanted to hit him, to pull him away from the sink. Then he realized she was tugging at the apron he’d put on, trying to tear it from him. He yanked it over his own head and threw it on the floor, and Eva burst into tears.
    She let him hold her that time. “I just can’t do it,” she sobbed, while he said to her, over and over, “I only wanted to help. I was just trying to help you, Eva.”
    He saw how it had happened. They were living out in the country, she was too much alone, she had to manage the house